


The Woman Who Was

by LyraNgalia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-05 02:46:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4162734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyraNgalia/pseuds/LyraNgalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happened was inconsequential. How it happened even more so. All that mattered was that a woman fitting the description of one long-dead Irene Adler was found, unconscious, in a London alley. And when she awoke in St. Bart's, she did not know her name, who she was, or how she'd ended up in that alley.</p><p>Nor did she know the man who came to the hospital and spirited her away to a small flat in the city. She did not know, but she followed anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mycroft

Mycroft Holmes showed up twenty-six hours and forty-two minutes after the Woman once known as Irene Adler took up temporary residence in 221B Baker Street. When he arrived, he found Sherlock at his microscope, carefully viewing a slide of fibers under the lens, while she stood in the heart of the flat, staring at the books and assorted detritus scattered on the shelves, a too-large blue silk dressing robe tied around her waist.

“So it _was_ you,” Mycroft said without preamble, cold and disdainful, a sneer on his face before he spun around to address his younger bother. “The trip to Capetown?”

“I went. You assumed I stayed the entire month.” Sherlock did not turn away from his microscope, though his body tensed, and he studiously remained focused on the slide, though his hands stayed away from the magnification knobs.

“Oh don't make this some commentary on what you call my _laziness_ , brother,” Mycroft snapped. “You went to Karachi. You couldn't leave well enough alone. You had to go and save _her_.” He gestured at the woman watching the exchange, her presence only worth noting for its inconvenience as far as he was concerned. “And now you've brought her back to your flat, this _Woman_ of yours. Are you really so childish, Sherlock? What in heaven's name are you thinking, that you can somehow play _house_ with her? She's a threat to national security. She's a extortionist, a blackmailer, she's practically a terrorist, for God's sake.”

Sherlock's jaw worked at his brother's litany, an obvious, failing attempt to avoid being baited by Mycroft's words, but before he could answer, a soft, feminine voice interjected, “An impressive list of accomplishments for her, if they're true. Is that why you insist on telling me she was complicated, Mr. Holmes?”

Sherlock would have relished the look of shock, the unfeigned expression of disbelief on his brother's face, if it had been caused by something other than her giving away her obvious state. Instead, he rose quickly from his seat at the microscope and crossed the flat in three long strides, decisively putting himself between Mycroft and the Woman who had been Irene Adler as Mycroft turned to face her. “You _are_ complicated,” he insisted shortly. “More so than my brother would acknowledge. He prefers to reduce you to a single word for his own peace of mind. _Dangerous_.”

Mycroft glared at Sherlock, at the way his younger brother moved to place himself between Mycroft and the woman who had been Irene Adler. “Sherlock Holmes, you are being _childish_ ,” he hissed. “She _is_ dangerous, she's proven that again and again, or do I have to remind you about Christmas? The fact that she has amnesia doesn't make her less dangerous.”

“I would disagree, Mr. Holmes.” Her voice again was soft, calm, without the razor-edge of the dominatrix in it, and it was obvious that despite the elder Holmes' prejudice against Irene Adler, he found it jarring as well, that she sounded so different. Her expression too, was benign, a small frown on her lips, her brow furrowing. “As much as you and your brother would like to insist otherwise, I'm not the woman you call Irene Adler.” A small shrug and upon seeing Sherlock open his mouth to contradict her, she corrects herself, “Not all of her, at least. Without her memory, I'm hardly as dangerous as you claim. After all, I wasn't aware of her... multitude of skills until you mentioned them.”

Mycroft at least had the good graces to look uncomfortable at the revelation, though he still watched her carefully, like one regarded a particularly venomous snake. “Perhaps not, but even without your full memory you still managed to find the safest place in London for yourself. Surely you don't expect me to believe this was _happenstance.”_

At the insinuation, Sherlock snapped, “I am not a _child_ , Mycroft.”

She shrugged. “I have instincts. They have proven to be quite useful. But while I can tell that your personal assistant has developed a pornography habit and a growing obsession with a young woman in the St. Bart's morgue, I can't tell you why I know it, or how.” She inclined her head towards Sherlock, then gestured to the violin on its stand. “An instrument makes noise regardless of who wields it, Mr. Holmes, as I've tried to remind your brother. Surely you'd prefer a broken instrument under close surveillance where its danger can be contained rather than out in the world, falling into heaven knows who's hands.”

A look of something like respect flickered in Sherlock's eyes, though it was gone as quickly as it had come, his lips thinning stubbornly, his jaw setting. It was obvious he detested her words, detested the implication of them, that she was broken, that she was less than the Woman he considered her. “She's _staying_ ,” he insisted, taking a step towards his brother, as if to physically remove the elder Holmes if he made a move. Mycroft sneered in disgust at the very idea, though he did take a step back towards the door.

“I'm setting extra security around your flat,” he said primly, with a glare at the woman. Her lips thinned in response, but she said nothing, turning her attention back to the shelves. Certain his implication was clear, Mycroft turned and made for the stairs.

“Good,” Sherlock snapped at his brother's back. “They can intercept any other _former CIA killers_ who might come after her.” There was no response to that besides a slamming of the front door, and Sherlock threw himself onto the couch, refusing to look at her, to see what her expression would tell him, what she thought of the exchange.

For her part, she simply returned to examining the bookshelves, to running her fingers over the spines of books, to examining a bit of bird's skull propped between a London guidebook and a physiology text. She stopped, however, when her study of the bookshelf led her to a leather riding crop. “Karachi,” she finally said as she picked up the riding crop, feeling the supple leather of it, the tiny nicks of wear against its end. “You went to Karachi for her, to save her.”

“ _You_ ,” he said, the correction immediate, instinctive, insistent, even as he sighed, resigned to the question, to the knowledge Mycroft had let slip, information that he would have preferred not to give her, because it would lead to __explanations__ _,_ an admission that something had to be explained, that something was _missing_ from her mind, something that she was not simply going to _work out_.

“I went to Karachi because you were about to die. And the world needed the Woman in it.”

The riding crop in her hand was a strangely familiar weight, strangely _comforting_. “From what I've heard, she didn't seem the type of person to have taken to dying in Karachi well.”

He did not respond, though a noise from him caught her attention, and she turned to look at him, the riding crop still in her hand. That provoked another sound from him, and she arched an eyebrow in silent expectant response, so wordlessly utterly Irene Adler that he answered, grudgingly. “You were resigned to it. You told me you wouldn't last six months before we parted ways.”

Her brow furrowed ever so slightly in response, momentary confusion tugging at her lips before she worked it out, before her mind made the simple hops from fact to fact, from what she'd gleaned of what he liked, what she knew he liked, to the answer. “You didn't take to her dying.”

She did not mention Karachi. Did not have to. It was beyond obvious that Karachi was negligible, that he would not take well to the Woman who was' death in any place, any time. It was, after all, why he watched her, why he studied her so intently as she moved about the room, hoping to glimpse some glimmer, some ghost of the Woman who was in her movements.

He shook his head once. Did not attempt to deny it. “You told me once. You like to know people will be on your side when you need them to be.” There was a note of defeat in his voice, something he could not hide, or did not want to bother denying. “You needed someone then.”

He did not point out that she needed someone _now_ , that a woman without memory but with Irene Adler's enemies needed assistance. She was glad he left that unsaid because if he had, she would have had to admit that she was less-than-capable, that she _needed_ his help. Even without the-Woman-who-was' memory, she knew she hated the idea of needing help. Of truly needing someone else.

He did not say it, but the unspoken implication remained.

Irene Adler liked to know people would be on her side when she needed them, and Sherlock Holmes was there when she did, even if she did not know it.


	2. Mary

It was three days and twelve hours after Mycroft Holmes' visit that Mary Watson walked into 221B Baker Street. She dropped by regularly these days, ostensibly to stretch her legs after work, but she and Sherlock had developed a rapport between them, stemming from a mutual interest in John Watson, as well as Mary's own realization that part of the care and keeping of John Watson's mental health included ensuring the care and keeping of Sherlock Holmes' physical health.  
  
So there was little need for Mary to announce herself as she took the stairs up to the flat, though she stopped short in the door when she saw a slight figure dressed in Sherlock's blue silk dressing gown, curled up in his seat, poring over a manila file of papers. "I'm sorry," Mary apologized instinctively, "I didn't realize he had a case. I should have knocked."  
  
The woman in the chair answered without looking up. "Don't apologize, it's rather obvious I'm not a case." She finished the page she was reading and set it aside before looking up, turning her head to Mary at the door. "Ah, Mrs. Watson. You must be the one who let Mr. Holmes know I was in hospital."  
  
Mary blinked, caught by surprise, and wondered briefly if this was how John felt during Sherlock's deduction sprees. She blinked too, at the woman who sat in the chair, and how different she looked now from the bruised and beaten body that had been brought to the hospital. Her bruises were fading, and the hair that had been hacked short and dyed an obviously unnatural red had been trimmed at her shoulders, redyed a dark brown that matched her roots. The shorter length made her hair curl, and between the hair, her pale knowing eyes, and the robe wrapped around her thin frame, it was almost as if Sherlock Holmes himself sat in his chair, rather than Irene Adler.  
  
"I mentioned to John that there was a Jane Doe without a memory in recovery," Mary answered cautiously. "Did Sherlock tell you I was coming?"  
  
The woman in the chair shrugged, the robe slipping over one pale shoulder. She ignored it and untucked herself from Sherlock's chair, setting the dossier she was reading aside so she could fully face Mary. The robe hung off her frame, the striped blue silk pooling around her bare feet. "No. But I heard you come up the stairs. Measured steps, but with a purpose. You're familiar with the space, and you weren't rushed. A client would be rushed, purposeful, but his steps would be hesitant, he'd go for the landlady's flat first."  
  
She gestured to Mary, a small pleased smirk on her lips. "And your voice gave away the fact that you were a woman, of course. And the only other woman who knows her way around this flat and would walk up would be the landlady and she already knows I'm here." She shrugged again, ignoring the way the gesture tugged at the dressing gown she wore, exposing more of her pale skin and the yellowing splotches where her bruises were fading, and nodded at Mary, who continued to watch her, her eyes flickering unconsciously towards the edge of her gown. “Obvious, if you knew where to look.”  
  
That particular phrase coaxed a raised eyebrow from Mary. “Feeling more like yourself then, Miss Adler?”  
  
To call her reaction to the name drastic would have been an understatement. Immediately, the small smirk that had tugged at the corner of her mouth disappeared, and all expression drained out of the woman's face as she pulled the dressing gown back up over her shoulder and gestured toward the window where Sherlock Holmes' music stand and violin stood. “He's out, seeing a deli owner about a pair of shears,” she informed Mary, ignoring the question entirely. “He should be back in the next twenty-six minutes. You're used to waiting, of course.”  
  
Mary blinked and her lips quirked into a small, tolerant smile, even as caution crept into her voice. "Is that obvious too? Given John and Sherlock's work, his wife would have to be patient, or extraordinarily unhappy."  
  
She shook her head, and her short loose curls swayed against her face with the gesture. “No, you were patient even before you were his wife. Though you are happy. Content with your husband and child,” she said, gesturing to Mary with a careless hand. She tilted her head, a curious look on her face as she studied her. And it was, again, strange how the look of intense focus on her face and the shortened hair, made the woman who had been Irene Adler look almost like Sherlock.  
  
“But it's in the way you stand, in the set of your fingers. You're patient, you have steady hands. Useful for a nurse but that's not how you got them. You like being happy, being who you are now. But your patience isn't because of it. You're someone used to waiting, waiting long hours, watching. Your finger on the trigger. You're used to seeing things and letting them wash over you, boxing them up. You're more than just Mary Watson.”  
  
Mary squared her shoulders, and there was a touch of iron in her voice, steel in her eyes, as she looked back at the woman studying her, the woman without a memory, the woman who had once been so absolutely untouchable and positively magnetic in her security. The woman Mary Morstan had once been remembered her then, remembered Irene Adler in her Louboutin heels and Alexander McQueen dresses. She remembered the Woman with her riding crop and her scarlet lips seen through a sniper's scope, remembered the sound of her voice low with promised secrets and her fingernails like talons and a part of her, the part of her who would never stop being the woman she had once been, ached for the imagined bite of her whip and the taste of blood drawn from her hand.  
  
“I am Mary Watson now,” she said calmly, firmly. “That's what matters.”  
  
Another long silence, in which the woman studied Mary and Mary remained unwavering under her gaze, until the woman spoke again. “But you knew her, before you were Mary Watson. You expected something when you saw me, and some part of you was disappointed you didn't see what you expected.” She laughed quietly at that, a wry bitter chuckle. “Shall we trade places, Mrs. Watson? You could forget your past and be nothing but who you think you are in this moment, and I could have the past I can't remember back.”  
  
She did not wait for a response, nor did Mary offer one, though Mary did marvel at how very much like Irene Adler the woman in front of her was, and how very much unlike her. The cool, self-possessed confidence, the way she took one look and saw _through_ disguises to what people knew, what they _liked_. But she was softer in some ways, less brittle, less flawlessly untouchable than the Woman in Louboutin heels, she wore her desires, her regrets and her fears a touch more openly, under a thin veneer of confidence rather than the dominatrix's armour.  
  
The woman tilted her head in the silence, listening, and gestured to the door as she turned away from Mary and took a seat back in Sherlock's chair, tucking her bare feet beneath her. “That will be him coming up the stairs in a moment. Partial success at the deli, judging by the opening of the door. He'd have had more success if he had not insisted on returning within an hour.” Before Mary could ask, she heard the telltale sound of Sherlock Holmes' footsteps on the steps up to 221B, and the woman added, “You could tell him it is ridiculous, if you'd like. His leaving this flat for one hour or six won't stop a determined enough assassin or a sniper's bullet. Nor would it stop me, if I decided to leave.”  
  
“Yet you haven't decided to leave, Woman,” Sherlock interjected as he swept through the door, bringing the smell of London and the tang of a sour pickle brine with him in the sweep of his coat. She remained curled up in his seat, the folder of papers back in her hands, her eyes focused on them. “And we both know you won't anytime soon.” He stopped then, and gave Mary a smile. “Hello, Mary. You recognize your former patient, I see.”  
  
Mary Watson smiled back, the set of her shoulder relaxing in Sherlock's presence and she tsked at him as she moved towards the kitchen, to the tea kettle and the tea things she had brought over during her _last_ visit. “I'm not the only one who recognizes someone in this flat,” she admonished him, taking him firmly by the elbow as she neared him and practically dragged him to the kitchen with her. She did not let go of him until they were in the kitchen proper, the woman once known as Irene Adler remaining seemingly ensconced in her reading material.  
  
“You didn't write down anything about m-- about the person I was, did you, Sherlock?” she asked, her voice pitched low in a firm, insistent hiss as she drew water for the kettle. Her tone was not actually questioning, merely waiting for confirmation as she continued, “You didn't tell her about me.”  
  
Sherlock shook his head slowly, his brow furrowing in momentary confusion before the question clicked and he turned his head sharply to look back towards the living room, back towards the woman without a memory sitting there like a ghost. “She figured you out, didn't she?” he asked, an excited, feverish light in his eyes, a manic energy seeming to suffuse his limbs. At Mary's look, he kept his voice down, but he began to pace as she put on the kettle and took down the tea, the pot, three cups. “She was always rather good. This is promising. This means her faculties are still there, the amnesia likely caused by localized damage.”  
  
Mary added tea to the pot as the kettle began to heat, and frowned at his words. “I'm not part of some experiment you're conducting with Irene Adler's brain, Sherlock Holmes,” she said firmly, snapping the lid back on the tea leaves with perhaps a bit more force than necessary. “John's told me what she did to you and your brother. That's barely the start of what she can do. I won't risk her regaining her memory and then threatening to burn down what I have just for her own pleasure.”  
  
His excitement, his manic energy, did not dissipate at her words, though he turned to her sharply, and his expression became suddenly focused. “You knew her then, before you were Mary Morstan,” he said, the detective again, following the trail of clues, of obvious facts. “When the world knew her as the dominatrix, before Mycroft knew of her.  
  
The china clattered against the tray as Mary set it down, cursing herself for the slip. It was sloppy to slip up like that, to let the threat of Irene Adler unbalance her. No, she corrected herself, the woman who sat in the other room was not the Irene Adler she'd known, the Irene Adler she had watched with growing obsession, the Irene Adler whose hand she had once imagined taking her by the throat. “I knew _of_ her,” she corrected. “She's what most people would consider a bad person. The sort of person who could have have needed to be quietly disappeared. She's dangerous. She may still need to be.”  
  
The focus remained in Sherlock's eyes, in his face, though the manic energy of before became glacial ice. “No, she won't, and _you_ won't, Mary,” he said firmly, his expression brooking no argument, his demeanor as cold and implacable as a machine. The kettle whistled, and he ignored it. “The Woman and I have an understanding. She doesn't play her games with the unsuspecting or the unwilling, not here, not in London. London is mine. It's out of her influence.”  
  
Mary stared back at him, unflinching for a moment. Her eyes searched his face wordlessly, and found something there, something in his unhesitating stance, in his unflinching expression, that stayed her protests. She stepped away from him, back to pluck the kettle from the heat, and added water to the tea leaves in the pot. “Even without her memory, you trust her. After all John said she did to you. All she was capable of _with_ her memory intact.”  
  
“I trust the Woman's self-interest,” Sherlock corrected, reaching over Mary and taking the tray of tea things. He was calmer now, more himself, more focused rather than the facade of the machine or the energy of the manic junkie, and he straightened his back as he turned towards the sitting room again, the tea tray in hand, to face the ghost of Irene Adler. “She is more than her memory. You'll see soon enough. Mycroft did.”  
  
Mary followed, and wondered who he was trying to convince. Her, or himself.


	3. John

It surprised everyone, a week after the woman who had been Irene Adler relocated to 221B Baker Street, to find her engaged in cordial conversation with John Watson. It surprised Sherlock, certainly, to see his best friend, who had absolutely no love for Irene Adler, speaking to the the woman who had once answered to that name, occasionally pointing to something in the file she had spread out before her.

Sherlock stood in the doorway of the flat, watching the scene before him with a furrowed brow, and it was a full minute and eighteen seconds before she turned to acknowledge him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Holmes,” she said, a touch of lilting laughter on her tongue as her eyes fell on him, as she saw something in the jut of his jaw and the set of his feet that must have amused her. “Dr. Watson was just telling me about your work.”

The arch amusement in her voice, the way his name fell from her tongue with such easy, mocking formality was so very much the Woman, so utterly Irene Adler, that Sherlock felt something twist painfully in the pit of his stomach, the sensation almost distracting him from John's response, his friendly, mild correction at her words, “Please, it's John.”

Shock chased away the twist in his gut and Sherlock's voice was sharp as he corrected, “You'd never let her call you John.” He turned towards her, and his voice was equally sharp, equally firm, but with an edge of something else in it, a rawness that he did not fully understand, much like he did not fully understand the twisting feeling in his gut earlier. “Irene Adler wouldn't call him John.”

Her lips thinned and she reached over, carefully closing the front of the dossier she had spent the last few days poring over, attempting to fit stark words to a life she did not but desperately wanted to remember. The way she glared at him, cool and untouchable, was so familiar it was like the twist of a knife, the Woman's displeasure simultaneously a thrill and a pang of equal proportions. She unfolded her legs from where she had been sitting, her feet tucked beneath her in his chair, and stood, the hem of his blue dressing gown swinging around her ankles. She had gone with Mary earlier to buy clothing, to find things that fit her, that suited her, but she preferred his robe while within 221B. “Must I remind you again that I am not Irene Adler, Mr. Holmes?” she asked coldly, her words razor sharp with angry frustration. “It hardly matters what _she_ would have called anyone.”

John looked from one of them to the other then back again, his mouth slightly agape at the obvious tension that had sprung up between them, the electric argument that had been theirs over and over again. It came to Sherlock's mind that this must be somehow familiar to John, he and the Woman glaring at each other, her with her hair dark and loosely curling, his best dressing gown belted at her slim waist. It was certainly a memory Sherlock had been unable to delete, one whose clarity struck him now like a blow to the chest as his mind involuntarily compared the woman in front of him to the memory of the Woman who was.

“You _are_ Irene Adler,” he snapped back. Except the Irene Adler that had taunted him with her camera phone had smirked maddeningly at him, rather than pursed her lips in frustrated anger. Except that the Irene Adler that had stood toe-to-toe with him before had long dark hair that tumbled like a riot down her back in loose curls rather than the short hacked off hair that now curled near her chin. Little things that broke the illusion, that made it difficult to simply _pretend_ she was as she had been.

“Sherlock...”

John's cautious attempt to break the tension, to keep Sherlock from continuing, went unheeded, as it normally did when the consulting detective had set himself firmly on a course, and he had, in this case, done precisely that. “You _are_ her. Because only she, only _you,_ could be this stubborn about something so obviously untrue just to prove a point.”

The woman who had once been confidently Irene Adler said nothing in response, though her throat worked visibly as she swallowed back words. The silence stretched on, seconds ticked by and when there was no angry response from her, no words like barbed wire that dug under Sherlock's skin, concern and something like fear wormed through Sherlock's indignation, the same sour taste that rose in the back of his throat whenever the woman who was did not respond the way the Woman would have, the unspoken thought that what if Irene Adler was _gone_ and no matter what he did, what _she_ did, the woman who was the ghost of Irene Adler was all that remained.

Before he could push that thought away, the woman in question rested her hand on the now-shut dossier she'd been studying previously and pushed them towards John Watson. Her short fingernails, stripped of blood red lacquer, scraped against the side table with the gesture. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice quiet, flat without the Woman's confidence or coldness. She swept past Sherlock, though she did pause on her way to Sherlock's bedroom, the bedroom that he'd relinquished to her without a word, to add over her shoulder, “Thank you for your help, Dr. Watson.”

The door to the bedroom clicked shut behind her without another word.

The silence stretched for another second. Two. Three. Four. Five, before it was broken by John Watson's sigh. “Well, that could have gone worse, I suppose,” he said, picking up the papers and straightening the stack. “You could have _actually_ brought her to tears.”

The words pulled Sherlock out of his shocked state, and he blinked, nonplussed, turning his attention away from the closed door and back to John. “What are you talking about?” he asked, “The Woman doesn't cry.” Not in his mind. Not over something as trivial as the now-familiar argument over who Irene Adler was, and whether the woman in the other room was her. No, he'd seen Irene Adler cry only once, and even then she had recovered from that weakness in Mycroft's home, had been proud even as death stared her down in the desert.

John stared at Sherlock then, his mouth slightly agape, as if he could not fathom the words Sherlock spoke, though this time from pity rather than rapturous interest. “You... really have no idea, do you?” he said quietly, with a glance over at the closed door. He gestured towards it, and began to pace. “You have no idea. You really think she's the same Irene Adler underneath the amnesia. That it's just a part she's playing and if you push hard enough the facade will break. And she'll be underneath it, Irene Adler, the real one, the one you call the Woman. You really think that, don't you?”

Sherlock's brows furrowed, as if he were staring at some particularly incomprehensible murder scene, but in this case no deduction came to mind, no immediate understanding, and his frustration was evident in his voice as he answered, watching John move from chair to window and back, “She _is_ in there, John. Her memories are there, she just needs a key to unlock the rooms in her mind palace.”

Another sigh, and John ran his hand over his short-cropped hair in exasperation. “She's an injured woman, Sherlock,” he said, his voice raised in frustration. He stopped himself immediately, as if realizing that raising his voice would do nothing but alert the woman in the other room of the subject of their argument. He caught himself, breathed, and continued in a hiss.

“Irene Adler might have been like you with your mind palace, but the woman in there? The one who couldn't even remember what her name was until you told her? She might be as brilliant as Irene Adler was but she's _terrified_. She's picked up enough from you and Mycroft to know that whoever she was, she is someone with enemies, but neither of you will tell her anything more for whatever bloody reason. Mycroft probably thinks it's national security and you think if you just wait it out she'll come back like she was. She knows there's no guarantee it'll all come back, but she'd rather start putting it all together rather than just waiting here for Mycroft's patience to wear out.”

There was no need for Sherlock to answer. It was obvious to even him that John didn't particularly _want_ an answer, not at the moment. Sherlock simply stood and let John's words crash over him like a wave, not even wincing when John slapped the sheath of papers in the dossier at Sherlock's chest and he had to catch them to keep them from spilling. “You won't talk to her and Mycroft won't and Mary won't come within a hundred meters of her. I'm the only one giving her any information at all, though God knows what she'd do with that, if you're right and she's just Irene Adler under it all.” John paused for another breath, and drew his hand over his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose in some obvious irritation. “She needs a _friend_ , Sherlock. She's scared and hurt and she doesn't need Mycroft looking at her like she's a time-bomb about to go off or you looking at her like a lab rat who won't do what it's supposed to. And if anyone can figure out how to be Irene Adler's friend it's bloody well not going to be me.”

Sherlock exhaled soundlessly, his own frustration and a knot of something else growing sour in the pit of his stomach, in an odd little hollow in his chest. He could not make John understand that for him to do as John suggested, to simply _give_ her information she wanted, would be an insult to her, to both the woman she was and the Woman she had been. To give her back her secrets (not that Sherlock was under any delusion that he had her secrets, she was far too clever for that) would have been to admit defeat, not simply for him but for her. To acknowledge that perhaps Irene Adler, the Woman who had brought both a nation and a consulting detective to their knees, was gone. He could not do that to her, even if she did not know why, and he could not do it to himself. Sherlock Holmes _needed_ a world with Irene Adler in it, needed a world where the hope that she would be whole and hale and his match still remained.

No, John would not understand. Would call him childish and selfish for keeping secrets from her. And perhaps he was. But he could do nothing else. The consulting detective could not fathom a world without the Woman in it, and Sherlock would have her back as she was, rather than to admit that perhaps all that remained was a ghost. His only comfort was in knowing that if there was a part of her that was the Woman buried deep within the mind of the woman in the other room, that _she_ would understand his reluctance. Would perhaps even be grateful for it upon her return.

He tried to ignore just how basely sentimental _that_ was. Hope.

“I've got a case,” he found himself saying, setting the dossier, the scant history of Irene Adler's misbehaviours, back on the side table. He ignored John's look of disbelief, of frustration, and reached for his coat on the hat rack. “I'll be back in an hour.”

John stared after Sherlock, his mouth slightly agape in disbelief, as he watched his friend leave the flat in a swirl of his coat. There was nothing more John could say, besides talking to the air, and instead he sighed, rubbed his forehead, and headed down the hall, to the closed bedroom door. “Hey um...” he hesitated, uncertain of what to say, or even what to call the woman who had shut herself in Sherlock's bedroom. For all his words to Sherlock, John had to admit there was _something_ about the Woman that lingered on in the woman who was. Something that made it too crass, too intimate, to simply address her as 'Irene'. But there was no way he would call her 'Miss Adler' the way he expected some of her clients would. So he found himself slightly tongue-tied, tripping over something that should be as simple as a name, and instead rapping on the door.

“Hey, look I'm sorry about Sherlock,” he said to the door. “He means well, but well, he and you, that is he and Irene Adler... things are complicated. I don't suppose I can properly explain it either. Just... he means well.”

On the other side of the door, the woman who was smirked, a familiar look of triumph crossing her face. She had, of course, heard every word that had passed between the consulting detective and his loyal blogger. And while the finer points of their exchange had slipped through her fingers like water, there was no mistaking the tone of John Watson's words. The hesitance, the guilt, the desire to atone for the less-than-ideal response of his best friend. Without knowing, without truly understanding how she knew, she still felt immense satisfaction well up within her, because the contrition in his voice spoke to her, told her that he would be open to the questions she had asked before and he had evaded. Yes, he would be more amenable to answering now, in some attempt to amend what he considered Sherlock's failing.

She swallowed back the thrill, forced the smirk from her voice and from her lips, and responded quietly, in the same brittle quiet voice she had used when she'd left the room in the first place. “I'll have to take your word for that, Dr. Watson.”

Another sigh from the other side of the door. “Look, Sherlock won't be back for another hour,” John said. “Why don't I make some tea. I know you've had questions. Sherlock would have better answers but... well, seems I'm the best you've got at the moment.”

The woman who had been Irene Adler smiled, unseen.


	4. Sherlock

The woman who had been Irene Adler stayed at 221B Baker Street for nearly a month.  
  
It was obvious that as days became weeks Mycroft grew steadily more displeased by her continued presence. Mrs. Hudson grew more curious as it became more obvious that the woman who was now staying at 221B did not stay in John Watson's old bedroom. John grew used to her presence, grew used to her questions, her seeking information the consulting detective would not give her. Sherlock, on the other hand, remained reticent and seemingly unconcerned, rarely deigning to acknowledge that anything at all was amiss, as if the Woman's presence was an anomaly, as if she would one day disappear despite all seeming evidence to the contrary.  
  
The woman herself seemed more confident with each passing day. Between John Watson's attempt to make up for the deficiencies in what he thought of as his best friend's response to her condition and information she and Sherlock gleaned from Mycroft's files and her own spotty memory, she had begun to understand the woman known as Irene Adler. Complicated, daring, ambitious. And with what she pieced together of Irene Adler's life before her 'death' in Karachi and the criminal enterprise she ran after the death of one Jim Moriarty and the death and resurrection of one Sherlock Holmes, she thought she understood what sort of Woman she had been.  
  
She might not remember Irene Adler, but she now knew who Irene Adler had been, and she found herself slipping on the part as if it were a comfortable mask or a second skin.  
  
There were gaps, of course, in her knowledge, hairline fissures in her mask. Things that required an emotional memory, a depth of feeling that she did not quite grasp. But those were few and far in between, and she was certain the only one who saw them were Sherlock Holmes.  
  
Which was fitting, given those gaps seemed to involve him intimately. Despite her best efforts, she still did not understand what had passed between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler in Karachi, or what had occurred between them during his death. All she knew were the basic facts, that he had saved her in Pakistan, because he could not abide a world without her in it, and that they had spent several months together during his false death, and either during or shortly after that time she had gained control of a criminal empire.  
  
What motivated either of them during that time remained a source of frustration, a mystery, to her.  
  
Had Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes been lovers during those months? Had it been something as simple as love that had motivated his rescue? What had she done, the dominatrix who'd brought a country to its knees, for him to demand that there not exist a world without the Woman in it?  
  
It galled her that she did not know, but she knew enough of Irene Adler now to know that she could not remain in Baker Street indefinitely until she found out. Criminal enterprises became unstable when their heads were missing for long, and she rather enjoyed the fact that this one was hers.  
  
So the woman who had been Irene Adler made plans to return. To trust in what skills she possessed and what knowledge she has gleaned to ascend Irene Adler's throne. It was dangerous, yes, but she was confident.  
  
Which was why she stood in 221B now, dressed not in the now-familiar silk dressing gown, but in a dove grey designer dress, stockings, and a pair of Louboutin heels. Each breath she took brought the strangely familiar scent of sandalwood and vanilla to her nose, and she took comfort in the fact that it all felt right, that it felt correct for her to stand here in said clothes, that the perfume she wore brought a sense of familiarity.  
  
She was not Irene Adler, not to herself, but the disguise felt like a second skin, felt right, and if disguises were a self portrait, she expect she had not far to go.  
  
"So this is it then," she said, tilting her head to look up at Sherlock Holmes, who stood toe-to-toe with her, so close as to practically be looming over her with his height despite the heels she wore. She wondered if that was the point, that he was attempting to intimidate her with his nearness, but she felt no such intimidation looking up at him. A small smirk played on her blood red lips, and she moved to step around him, to head for the door to the now-familiar flat and London beyond.  
  
"Goodbye, Mr. Holmes."  
  
His hand shot out to catch her wrist without conscious thought, though Sherlock should not have been surprised. She surprised him. She made him surprise _himself_ with how easily sentiment welled up for her despite his attempts to deny them. If that was not proof that she was Irene Adler to her very core, he did not know if there could be proof.  
  
She was more Irene Adler now than she had been when he'd brought her back to his flat. It wasn't simply the designer clothes or the Louboutin heels, or even the lipstick that made her smirk as bright as blood against porcelain. There was a confidence to her again, a surety that was so utterly the Woman's that he could almost believe she remembered.  
  
But there were still moments when she'd slip, tiny slips, when she used words that meant something to him but not to her, when his reactions would be met by a blank look, that would break the illusion. That made him remember that she did not know, did not know him, did not know _them_ , as Irene Adler had. And there were the flashes of surprise in her face like the one now, when he took her wrist, that showed him that she did not remember, even as she learned facts and built up knowledge of who the Woman had been, she did not remember the tiny touches, the gestures that were _theirs_ in a way words were not.  
  
She stopped, a look of momentary surprise on her face that then turned to one of expectancy, and Sherlock found himself at a loss for words. There were a hundred things he could say, and of that, at least fifty that he wanted to express. He wanted to tell her to be careful, that her allies were dangerous, that if she needed him he would come. But the words died in his throat, because being careful was not in the Woman's vocabulary, because she was more dangerous than any ally of hers could ever hope, because to admit that he would come to her aid was an admission of sentiment, one that neither of them would acknowledge.  
  
So he stood, swallowing down his words yet not letting go, and found his fingertips resting against her pulse. Her elevated pulse, her pupils dilated as she watched him expectantly, and it was nearly enough for him to want her to stay, despite all knowledge that the Woman would not stay, that to ask would be dangerous, because the Woman would not stay but the woman who had been Irene Adler might and prove herself a ghost. His eyes focused on her lips, on the memory of the waxy taste of her lipstick, and he said nothing.  
  
She waited, another second, two, and suddenly he felt her lips on his, warm and familiar against his mouth, kissing him with unexpected deliberation. Even in his shock, he kissed her back, because he could not imagine ever _not_ kissing the Woman back when she kissed him. Impulse gave way to a slower pace, a cautious exploration, but before he could pull her to him, she stepped away, broke the kiss with an audible sigh. "The last time you said goodbye, you thought you were about to die," he found himself saying, his eyes blinking open from some moment before when he had made no conscious thought to close them, his voice low as he pulled back. As he let go of her wrist and the familiar fluttering pulse beneath his fingers. "We never say goodbye."  
  
She stepped away then, breaking the bubble of contact between them thoroughly, and all he could think of was that her lipstick had been smudged, the smallest imperfection at the corner of her mouth. "No goodbyes," she echoed, though it seemed to be one of agreement, and another step, moving backwards until she reached the door. She lingered there for a moment, her hand on the threshold, until she smirked, a small quirk of her lips and smudged lipstick, and turned her back on him, her stiletto heels clicking on the stairs, and her words drifted back to him. "Til the next time, Mr. Holmes."  
  
He breathed then, drew in a long slow breath, the ghost of vanilla and sandalwood curling into his brain. There was enough in the Woman's response to satisfy him, and he nodded, his words spoken only to himself, a promise and some small sentimental hope, that the next time he saw her, she would be herself again, the Woman whole and hale in all her mystery. "Til the next time, Miss Adler.”


End file.
